


bound to stumble and fall (but my strength comes not from man at all)

by sibley (ferns)



Series: Tikkun Olam [4]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Antisemitism, Canon Jewish Character, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Jewish Identity, Judaism, Loss of Faith, Mentions of Racism, Mentions of homophobia, Pre-Canon, Rediscovery of Faith, crisis on earth-x reaction fic, even if dctv won't admit it, mentions of past suicide attempts, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 01:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12876903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: When Barry was little, his mother called him Tovia.When he’s anxious, Barry puts the charm from his mother's necklace in his mouth-a six-pointed star seated safely inside of a hand with its palm facing up. A shield for bravery and perseverance inside of a good luck charm. Joe tells him to wear it under his shirt while he’s at school just in case. Barry doesn’t know why-he thinks it’s beautiful. And it belonged to his Mom. So he wants to wear it proudly.





	bound to stumble and fall (but my strength comes not from man at all)

**Author's Note:**

> Fuck the CW, fuck the crossover, fuck DCTV, and thanks Ezra Miller for finally confirming Barry's Judaism. I cried like twelve times while writing this. Read the beginning and then skip the first half of the middle if you're triggered by antisemitism. This is hardly edited because I can't reread it without crying so...Enjoy. Title is from Miracle by Matisyahu.

When Barry was little, his mother called him  _ Tovia. _

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He asks, giggling when she lifts him up and sets him down on the counter and smears berry jam from the triangle-hat shaped cookies she’s making on his nose. Barry’s already planning his costume. He’s going to be an astronaut who’s dressed as a pirate.

“It’s your secret name,” Nora says, kissing his forehead. “It’s the name you should never give out to anybody unless you trust them. It’s the name God knows you by, my beautiful boy. When he speaks to you, he will use that name.”

“Tovia,” Barry says, annunciating the  _ ‘a’ _ just a little bit too much and too sharply as he wipes the jam off of his nose. “But what does that  _ mean _ _ ,  _ Mom?"

“It means you are  _ everything  _ that is good about the world.” She gives him another kiss, this time on the cheek. “And you should never let anybody tell you differently, alright? You are perfect.  _ Every  _ part of you is perfect.”

(She does not tell him that he was a part of a set. Her beautiful son doesn’t need that burden yet. He doesn’t need to know that he was Tovia and that his tiny cold brother was Adin, the exiled one who returned from Babylon. She does not know that she will never have a chance to tell him.)

Joe doesn’t call him Tovia. Barry doesn’t trust him enough to tell him. But he tells Iris, and she tells him that that’s a very cool name and she wishes she had one half as cool as that. And he tells her that Iris is the best name in the whole world for her, and he can’t imagine her with a different one, and-

Iris doesn’t call him Tovia, though, just like her dad doesn't, and Henry doesn’t either. Barry’s not allowed to see Henry most of the time. He doesn’t know why. His dad didn’t do anything  _ wrong,  _ he didn’t kill Nora, he would  _ never  _ have  _ ever  _ in a million years killed Nora. Barry's parents loved each other more than anything else in the whole wide world. But no matter how loudly he shouts it the world pushes him back down and insists that Henry Allen murdered Nora Allen and isn’t that such a shame?

Joe, at least, cares enough to make sure he ends up with the necklace that his mother always wore even though sometimes Henry gently pulled her close to his chest and whispered that maybe she should take it off, just for now, just for the day, while they go to this important event for his work-not because either of them have ever been ashamed but because it is so hard for him to watch what the world does to her. To both of them.

When he’s anxious, Barry puts the charm in his mouth-a six-pointed star seated safely inside of a hand with its palm facing up. A shield for bravery and perseverance inside of a good luck charm. Joe tells him to wear it under his shirt while he’s at school just in case. Barry doesn’t know  _ why- _ he thinks it’s beautiful. And it belonged to his Mom. So he wants to wear it proudly.

Tony Woodward sees it and gets an ugly grin on his face and grabs Barry’s shoulder so tightly he has a bruise for three days and takes the charm in his other hand and tries to rip it off Barry’s neck. The chain holds, at least, but it leaves Barry with a painful but not serious cut on the back of his neck. A teacher separates them and tells Tony to go to the office before kneeling down in front of Barry and asking if he’s alright. Somehow, Barry manages to stumble out that the necklace used to belong to his mommy, and that’s all he can say before Joe is being called and he’s being sent home.

Barry wears the necklace under his shirt as much as he possibly can from then on. He doesn’t know the sick shameful feeling in his stomach yet, or the feeling like there’s something fluttering in his ears-his ears which feel like he’s on an airplane and they’re all stuffed up about to pop-but he will.

In sixth grade, Barry opens his locker and a bunch of bars of soap fall out.

He looks around at them in confusion as they lay innocuously on the tile floor of the school, eyebrows furrowed. Iris picks one of them up. “Why did someone give you  _ soap?  _ That’s a weird prank. Why’d they go to all the trouble of bringing it to school?”

When Barry tries to get the rest of the soap out, since two bars have been stuffed at the top of his locker on the shelf, a little note comes out. Barry picks it up.

_ “‘This should have been you’,”  _ he reads out loud to Iris, still confused.

Iris purses her lips together. “I think we should call my dad and tell him about this,” she decides. “It’s  _ weird  _ and I don’t like it.”

They go to the principal’s office and call Joe together and Barry realizes that the sick fluttering feeling is back in his stomach.

Joe arrives, furious, and loads them in the car before going back into the school. Iris and Barry sit in tense silence, exchanging confused looks with each other until Joe gets back.

“Barry,” he says, “do you want to go back to this school tomorrow?”

Barry blinks. “Are you serious?”

“I’m very, very serious. Do you want to go back to this school tomorrow, or do you want to go to a different school where this kind of thing doesn’t happen?” His hands are clenched into fists on the steering wheel. “It’s your choice.”

“I-I guess I’ll-I’ll-um-” He looks at Iris, who shrugs at him, mystified. “I guess I’ll stay?”

“Okay. That’s your choice, Bar. You can stay here if you want to stay here. But if something like this happens again, I want you to call me, okay? And then you’re leaving this school no matter what,” Joe says firmly. There’s a moment of silence. “Okay, we’re going to get ice cream. I’ve had an exhausting day and I’m sure Captain Frye won’t mind.”

Barry doesn’t ask why Captain Frye won’t mind. That’s one of the things he’s not supposed to talk about even though he doesn’t really know why.

After they get ice cream, Barry goes home and, with a bad feeling in his stomach, uses Joe’s computer to look up why someone would put soap in his locker. It takes him about an hour before he finds out why, connects it to the note, and throws up his ice cream in the little trashcan Joe keeps underneath his desk. When he tells Iris about it, she starts yelling, throwing her pillows around and demanding to know who did that so she can-

Barry swallows back more bile and goes downstairs to tell Joe he’s not sure if he wants to go back to school tomorrow. He can go next week, tomorrow is Friday and he can afford to miss it since he’s been such a good student the rest of the time.

Joe says that’s okay.

Barry transfers schools next month when someone carves a word that starts with a  _ K  _ that he doesn’t know and Joe forbids him from looking up into his locker door with their keys underneath a familiar symbol.

At this new school, there’s one other Jewish kid in the class, a girl with black curly hair named Yael who edits Barry and Iris’s social studies essays for them in exchange for their help with math, something she’s always struggled with. The next year, she asks Barry why he never had a Bar Mitzvah, eyes wide and curious. She looks almost like Henry’s sister, and Barry wonders if they’re cousins and they just don’t know it.

“My mom died when I was eleven,” Barry says uncomfortably, and changes the subject.

Barry asks Joe later why he never got one, and if that means he’s not  _ really  _ Jewish, and Joe tells him that the Bar Mitzvah doesn’t make the man (“Yes, it does.” “That’s not the point, Barry.”) and that just because he hasn’t had one doesn’t mean he’s not Jewish. He tells Barry that he’s not sure if he could afford the party afterwards but if Barry wants to have a late Bar Mitzvah then he can have one.

“...No,” Barry decides, hoping that this isn’t a mistake, “I’m-I’m okay. I’m fine. I don’t need one.”

“Are you sure?” Joe asks.

Barry swallows. “I’m sure.”

Sometimes he wonders why he said that. Sometimes he wonders what haftarah section he would’ve read in front of everybody. Sometimes he wonders what it would’ve felt like to be thirteen and sit in a chair and get lifted and to feel like the king of the world. He wonders if he’ll get that chance one day when he gets married. Sometimes he wonders if his family members outside of Joe and Iris and maybe Nora’s older brothers would’ve come. Nora’s family doesn’t like him much. He doesn’t remember a lot from meeting Henry’s.

Sometimes Barry is sure he made the right choice not to have a B’nai Mitzvah because he wouldn’t want to have one without Henry there to see it and be proud of him. And he doesn’t know how he would’ve looked at the empty seat waiting for Nora.

High school is hard. In high school, Tony Woodward is back, with a whole new repertoire of words that he can hurl at Barry and Iris (mostly Barry, which is good in Barry’s opinion-he doesn’t want Iris getting hurt like this) just to make them flinch. Barry hears that word, the one that starts with a K, the one that Joe won’t tell him about, spoken aloud for the first time in high school. It’s like getting the wind knocked out of his lungs.

Barry doesn’t stop wearing the necklace, though, even if it’s hidden. He whispers his names under his breath to himself and doodles them on pieces of paper. He wonders what Hebrew would sound like coming off of his tongue and tries to remember the Shema. Tries to remember the few words of Yiddish his mom would sprinkle throughout her vocabulary that she passed onto him. Barry can only remember four of them, and they’re not very useful.

He spits one of them at Tony, tells him to  _ shut up  _ in a language he’s sure Tony doesn’t know, the next time that Tony calls Iris a word Joe’s told them they should never repeat and Barry especially should  _ never  _ say for hanging out with a ‘dirty Jew’ like Barry, and is called to the office by a teacher who was passing by who doesn’t know what he said but refuses to listen to his protests that Tony’s the one who started it and they can ask any kid in school about that!

High school is hard. Depression and anxiety hit their peak for Barry and it’s all he can take not to try to end it some days. Iris brings him home when he rides his bike out to the busiest street near Joe’s house and sits at the edge of the road and cries and screams because it’s  _ just not fair.  _ She hugs him tightly and at night he comes into her room when he can hear her crying because while she has far more friends than he does it’s still not a lot and it seems like more of them turn against her every day.

Barry holds her just like she holds him and promises that he’ll always be there for her because they’re best friends and he loves her more than anything. They pinky-promise on it, a leftover childhood habit they picked up from Barry and his mom, and sometimes Barry falls asleep on the floor of Iris’s room or Iris falls asleep on the floor of Barry’s and it’s okay because they have each other.

Things get harder around the holidays, and they’re at their hardest in high school, but Barry manages. Or at least he tries to. Joe gets involved at that point, and Barry doesn’t know whether to cry with relief or anger or fear because he  _ can’t  _ afford to be rejected by Joe.

On Christmas Eve of Barry’s sophomore year he comes home to find a mezuzah hanging on his bedroom doorway while Joe sheepishly tells him he’s sorry he wasn’t able to get one sooner but it took him  _ forever _ to find someone who would make one for him. Barry hugs him so hard he feels like he’s going to make Joe burst and cries into his chest and just once it’s a good Christmas.

Somehow, Barry manages to make it through high school with only one outright suicide attempt. And somehow he gets into a good college, just like Iris does-even though they’re unfortunately  _ not  _ the same college.

In college, Barry’s not sure where he fits in. He joins the GSA, first not sure if he’s the  _ straight  _ part of it and then knowing he’s in the murky in-between waters between gay and straight. He’s gay-with-exceptions, or maybe he’s straight-with-exceptions, and luckily Iris is along for this particular journey too.

The word ‘bisexual’ feels nice on Barry’s tongue. Iris sticks with ‘queer’ for now. That’s okay. Barry listens to her say it whenever they get together and smiles. It was a slur for them both before, in high school with Tony Woodward as their top priority, and taking it back feels nice.

When they have breaks and come home from their respective colleges and come home to see Joe, they have a million stories to tell him and each other that they couldn’t with letters and pictures. Barry tells him about how freeing it felt to be away from him, because no matter how much he loves Joe it’s not easy to grow up trying to bring your high school girlfriends and singular secret boyfriend over to a cop. Iris says essentially the same thing.

Over chicken noodle soup, Barry tells them about finally having a community, a group of friends that isn’t just Iris and maybe one of her friends that she dragged along for the ride. Iris tells them about how she’s decided not to date anybody for a little while since her last relationship (with a girl named Eloise) ended, but that doesn’t mean Barry can’t send her the numbers of anybody cute he sees that’s her type.

Barry doesn’t say what he wants to say, about how anybody would be lucky to date Iris, about how he’d do anything for her, but he does promise to tell his friends that she’s single even though it makes something jealous and sour twist in his stomach. He pushes it down. What matters is Iris’s happiness, not his feelings about her.

It’s in college that he meets David, who tells him he’s never met anybody with the name  _ Tovia  _ before and he’s sure Barry just made that up on the spot. Barry’s confused. That’s-that’s his other name, isn’t it? That’s always been it.

He talks to his dad about it as soon as he can, and Henry tells him that Nora was always pretty nontraditional. Even so, it doesn’t matter if someone from Sun City University has never heard the name before, because that name is between Barry and his Rabbi and God and nobody else unless he wants it to be. Your name is your business and yours alone.

Barry grows and gets a job and enjoys himself and keeps working on trying to find a way to prove that his dad never killed his mom. He doesn’t give up. He’s not sure if he believes in a God anymore, after all the things he’s seen in his short time working for the CCPD. Barry’s not sure if he  _ ever  _ believed in a God. What kind of God lets an innocent woman die? What kind of God lets something with as much power as the man in the lightning exist and would let him use it to hurt and kill people instead of helping them?

Doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t have a traditional name, never had a Bar Mitzvah, doesn’t practice any holidays, doesn’t know any prayers, can’t read Hebrew… Maybe Barry’s not really Jewish at all. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

And then he gets struck by lightning.

He wakes up nine months later to a city at war with itself.

Barry thinks about Gideon, who led a mere three hundred men against the Midianite army and won. About Judah, who let the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid army and prayed for a miracle to keep their holy light lit. About David and the giant Goliath.

Barry thinks about how he’s just like the man in yellow now, a miracle just like him only  _ better  _ because the man in the lightning hurt people and Barry would never hurt somebody like that, kill an innocent woman and let her husband take the fall for it, and his heart seizes inside of his chest.

But he keeps fighting and doesn’t stop and Tony comes back and then  _ dies  _ and Cisco gets kidnapped by Snart and his sister and Rory and sometimes he feels like he’s on top of the world and other times he’s Atlas holding up the sky on his shoulders. And then Wells is Eobard Thawne and the man in yellow and the Reverse Flash all at once and Iris knows he’s the Flash and Cisco’s been having dreams of another timeline, another world, and-

And Barry runs back in time and holds his mother while she dies and listens to her call him Tovia again and sobs against her corpse when the last words of the Shema die on her lips along with her breath.

The lightning in Barry’s veins burns when he runs all the way around the world and ends up back at his old house, the house where Nora was killed. He watches from outside for a few minutes, but nothing particularly interesting happens, so he runs back to STAR Labs with the wind in his ears and his lungs heaving with sobs that he refuses to let escape.

Barry’s not sure if he believes in a God. Any god. He’s not sure if he  _ can  _ believe in one with the soft steady conviction that his parents always seemed to be able to. The thought of having an unwavering faith in an all-powerful someone that would allow so many atrocities is… Terrifying, or at least it is for Barry.

What was it Henry used to tell him, back when he still thought someone would believe him about his innocence? When Barry was little and desperate to prove Henry’s innocence in any way possible, even more desperate than he is now? That being Jewish was about questioning everything? Yourself, the world around you, your family, your friends, even God?  _ Everything?  _

Questioning is something Barry can do. Questioning is something that’s always come naturally to him, although when he was a kid it was called ‘undiagnosed ADHD’ and ‘being an annoying brat’. But questioning everything kept him from going insane from everyone telling him that Henry was guilty and that Barry should just let everything happen because there was nothing that he could do. Barry  _ insisted  _ and he  _ questioned  _ and he  _ tried _ to make people hear him.

Questioning is familiar territory.

So for now, Barry can question.

Barry closes his eyes and breathes in and thinks about soap in his locker and swastikas drawn on his notebooks by Tony and about his mother’s hamentashen and about the mezuzah on his apartment door, the same one Joe gave to him years ago, and about how he’s started trying to be a little more observant and looked up the words to the Shema online and has started saying it before he goes to bed every night.

Maybe he should hold another shiva for his mom, even though she died years ago. It feels like minutes. All of it feels like minutes. Caitlin is mourning Ronnie and Iris is mourning Eddie and so instead he runs from STAR Labs to Stein’s house and asks him for advice because he’s pretty much the only older Jewish person Barry knows since Cisco is younger than him (and, despite growing up interfaith, much more in touch with his Judaism than Barry knows how to be).

Stein tells him to do what he thinks is right, whether that’s sit shiva to allow himself time to move on or not.

Barry remembers his mom telling him not to be ashamed of being Jewish, remembers what little of Ronnie he had the time to know but how much it felt like they knew each other from the stories that made Caitlin’s eyes light up whenever she told them, remembers the tiny tzedakah box Eddie gave him for Christmas because “I don’t know when Hanukkah is this year but I made this for you and I want you to have it, I hope it’s okay that I’m giving it to you on Christmas”.

He swallows. “I think they all deserve someone to sit shiva for them.”

Stein squeezes his shoulder. “Then give them one. Being Jewish is about remembering. Nobody else remembers like we do.”

Barry feels the ghost of his mother’s hands on his face and nods.

Nobody questions like they do. Nobody remembers like they do.

Barry remembers when his mother called him Tovia and he will never forget.

**Author's Note:**

> To reiterate, fuck the crossover for brutally killing a black man onscreen and letting a Jewish man die at the hands of nazis.


End file.
